Lynn Dralle got her start on eBay the way many people did in the
late 1990s--she was searching for Beanie Babies to buy.

For those who are too young to remember, or for those whose
pop-culture memories are fuzzy, this was a decade in which tiny,
furry stuffed animals created by Ty Inc. were decreed collectible
items because of their limited availability and short manufacturing
lives. It was an age in which otherwise rational people were
suddenly buying the stuffed animals by the dozen and occasionally
paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for an individual stuffed
Beanie Baby, certain they would recoup their investments tenfold.
It was an age of Beanie Baby magazines, books and collectors'
cases.

"They will come back again," the Palm Desert,
California, entrepreneur says confidently, citing a Beanie Baby she
recently saw on eBay with a bid of $1,150.

Whether Beanie Babies will be as good an investment as old coins
or comic books remains to be seen, but in that period, they were a
profitable venture for entrepreneurs like Dralle, who bought Beanie
Babies on eBay to sell as future collectibles in her
grandmother's antiques store. The experience went so well, she
couldn't help but start shopping on eBay for herself. "My
grandmother bought me a vase when I was 13, and I had never found
another piece like it," explains Dralle, 42. "Now, I have
13 of those vases, and every time I buy one, it reminds me of my
grandmother."

Silly, sublime, sentimental or strange, every entrepreneur has a
story about how he or she started on eBay. While the tales are
different, one plot element remains the same: eBay improved their
quality of life--not to mention their income.

Nomad No More

Six years ago, Tim Siegel, then 30, was going places.
Specifically, he was driving from Minnesota to Guatemala, after a
friend convinced him that he could make a lot of money selling
medical equipment down there. It was worth a shot. Siegel's
degree in criminology had led him into a job managing
telemarketers, which he considered the worst job he ever had, and
then into management at a hospitality company. The upside of his
second job was that he got to visit far-flung lands like Guam and
Malaysia. So when a friend convinced him of the financial gains to
be found selling medical equipment in Guatemala, Siegel figured he
would, at the very least, get to do something he loves: travel.

True enough. But while the 3,000-mile trip by truck--and school
bus--was at first an adventure, it eventually became exhausting.
Siegel's friend had been right. Because Guatemala's
infrastructure is so poor, those with money are willing to pay top
dollar for what they need to buy. As Siegel says, "If a
surgical table is worth $1,000 here, an end user in Guatemala would
pay two to three times [that]. That is also true with vehicles or
just about anything else. So many people currently export down
there, I would guess it's very tough to make a profit
now."

But not back then. Siegel would always sell his vehicle after
all the goods were sold, then fly home. But it was still a
challenging journey.

In 1999, the same friend suggested he try selling his
merchandise on eBay, and Siegel leapt at the chance. A fetal
monitor bought for $250 sold for $500, and Siegel knew he was never
going back to Guatemala. Today, Siegel has an eBay-based company
called Matrix Medical that sells mostly medical and
dental equipment to buyers around the world, with about 5 percent
of sales from other products.

Siegel hopes to eventually have his own warehouse, a bigger
truck and employees. In a recent month, he brought in $36,000, and
his 2005 gross sales should be just under half a million
dollars.

"It's nice not risking my life driving 3,000
miles," says Siegel. "These days, I'll buy anything,
because I know I can sell it. My confidence level has risen a lot.
When you buy something for $500 and can sell it for $8,000, it
really blows your mind. I'm sure without eBay, I'd have
been successful, but it's hard to say what would have happened.
Would I have kept going to Guatemala and crashed somewhere? Now I
can buy something and literally have the money for it today, as
opposed to waiting." And driving.

In the Beginning

Freedom to Create

In early 2003, Hae Yoon was riding
her dirt bike in the hills of Bishop, California, with her friends,
enjoying the rush of the wind in her face. Far off was the highway,
with a truck barreling down it, and Yoon couldn't resist trying
to race it. My family shouldn't worry, Yoon thought, giddy.
Riding a dirt bike is perfectly safe, as long as you know what
you're doing...

Then she noticed the barbed-wire fence in front of her.

Yoon, now 32, had quit her job as a marketing manager for an
event-planning company in November 2002. She was planning to start
her own business in the yoga industry, when she discovered dirt
biking isn't really perfectly safe. After a successful back
surgery, Yoon moved in with her brothers, recovering and living off
the money she had saved for her business. By the time she felt up
to striking out on her own, it was spring 2004. She moved back to
Los Angeles and attempted to reignite the business she had almost
started.

She planned to produce yoga-mat bags, among other yoga-related
accessories, but after spending several thousand dollars on some
prototypes, she realized it was too expensive a venture to
attempt--and besides, her savings were almost depleted. With
Christmas coming and no career to speak of, she was beginning to
feel a bit demoralized.

About that time, she found some cashmere sweaters at a great
discount and started selling them on eBay just for the fun of it.
"It was just something I stumbled on through a friend,"
says Yoon. "He mentioned a place where he got all this great
merchandise for outrageous prices. I put [the sweaters] on eBay to
see what would happen, and I sold out in 48 hours."

Yoon was enlightened. Yoga wasn't the answer; eBay was. She
began selling women's apparel full time this January, and
already, her business is on track to pull in between $300,000 and
$400,000 in 2005. "The benefits have been enormous," says
Yoon, whose hallway and dining room are full of inventory, though
she eventually hopes to move to an office and have employees.
"I want to work 10 times harder than I ever did at my previous
jobs. It feels great to know you're creating something and not
working on a project for somebody else."

Brick, Mortar and Morale

The 21st century had arrived, but nobody at Machinery
Values felt like celebrating. In 2001, founder and CEO Gene
Valitt, now 64, was afraid he would be putting up a
going-out-of-business sign instead of celebrating the company's
30th anniversary. The industrial machine dealer in Harrison, New
Jersey, had gone from 70 employees to 35, from making $20 million
annually to less than $10 million. The way it looked, the future
partners--Valitt's sons Andrew and David, 39 and 36,
respectively, and Rick Lazarus, 37, who all work in various
capacities at Machinery Values--had little future to look
toward.

COO Art Lazarus, who had become a partner in 1995, kept trying
to think of a way to stop the damage. "We went through a very
difficult time--the recession, 9/11 and a three-and-a-half year
period where business was really lousy in our industry," says
Art, 59. "People weren't expanding, prices dropped, and
our revenue dropped. We were losing money."

The breakthrough came when Art began to think about their
"dead inventory," $250,000 worth of metalworks equipment
and odds and ends. It was all perfectly good material, but was
inexpensive enough that they could never justify spending
advertising money to alert customers it was available. So they just
kept collecting a warehouse full of items. "We said,
'Business is lousy, we're sitting around here--we should
put people to work clearing this stuff out, cleaning it,
photographing it and selling it on eBay,'" Art
recalls.

Everything sold, to the point where Machinery Values was
bringing in as much as $20,000 a month. Art started scrapping the
catalogs they produced two or three times a year--which cost the
company about $100,000 each time--and began marketing their
products through eBay instead. Now, a few years later, the company
brings in over $1 million a year--or about 15 percent of its
sales--from eBay. Art says eBay has also introduced many customers
to their business, bringing traffic into their warehouse. Counting
indirect sales, Art credits eBay for bringing in 30 percent to 40
percent of business--and saving the company.

It's Good to be Home

Dralle believes eBay has saved her quality of life. And why
shouldn't she? After her grandmother passed away in 2000 at the
age of 88, Dralle kept the antiques store running for a while, but
had to close up shop two years later. The overhead was too high,
and a lifetime of memories lingered. Running the business without
her grandmother around just wasn't the same. Meanwhile, Dralle
had visions of working out of her house so she could be with her
kids.

Today, Dralle's website links to her eBay Store, which brings
in approximately $250,000 a year selling antiques. That's not
even counting her earnings from her series of eBay books with
titles like The 100 Best Things I've Sold on eBay.
And just as she hoped, she sees her children a lot more than she
ever did when she put in 50 hours a week at the store.

"Now, I take them to school and pick them up, and they know
they can come in [my home office] and do their homework," she
says. When they aren't in school, they can ride around with
Dralle, who spends much of her time canvassing garage sales and
looking for treasures she can sell on eBay. She cites a recent
example of a wood carving of a bird, which she recognized as a
piece of work by a master carver. She paid $2 for it, but plenty of
collectors were quick to recognize its value. The top bid for the
carving was $2,052. "Those are the ones that make me jump up
and down," says Dralle. "Really, I'm just so happy
that I can live wherever I want, and I love what I'm
doing." It's one of those intangibles that nobody can put
a price on.